Appareo Systems, an industry leader in the design and manufacture of lightweight Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) systems, announced that the nation’s largest Helicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) operator, Air Methods, has signed an agreement to equip 150 of its light helicopters with Appareo Vision 1000s. This implementation will add to the 41 Air Methods aircraft that are already equipped with Appareo equipment.
ALERTS – Aircraft Logging and Event Recording for Training and Safety – is Appareo’s award-winning, turnkey Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) and Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) solution designed for light and legacy aircraft. ALERTS includes flight data capture hardware and a full suite of software analysis tools, making a comprehensive FDM program possible for any aircraft operator. The Vision 1000 is a compact unit that weighs less than half a pound and installs on the headliner of the aircraft. It captures inertial data, ambient and intercom audio and high-resolution cockpit imagery, providing a complete picture of what occurred during every moment of each flight.
“Air Methods believes the Appareo Vision 1000 system was the best fit to meet our current and future flight data monitoring needs,” said Ed Stockhausen, Air Methods vice president of safety. “The system is compact, lightweight, and easy to install, making it the ideal solution to help us continue to enhance our comprehensive flight data monitoring program and further improve safety within our operations.”
Investment in safety technology, instruction and infrastructure is nothing new to Air Methods. Since 2006, the company has spent more than $100 million advancing its safety initiatives and this ALERTS implementation continues that commendable effort. The majority of the 150 new units will be installed on Air Methods’ Eurocopter AS350 and EC130 and Bell 407 helicopters, bolstering its FDM program with data from light aircraft that typically wouldn’t be equipped with larger and more expensive traditional flight data recorders.
“Air Methods is unquestionably a HEMS industry leader and we’re very pleased to partner with them on an implementation of this magnitude,” said Appareo aviation business unit manager Tony Grindberg. “The value of a comprehensive flight data monitoring program simply cannot be overstated and it’s clear that the entire Air Methods organization is standing squarely behind the company’s safety efforts. But it’s more than just having the best technology – Air Methods has also assembled a top-notch team of safety professionals who will be working with our hardware and software to be sure that their fleet is operating as safely as possible.”
